Rice Blogger

I had always like buying domain, not sure why, may due to the fact that it is pretty cheap. Choosing a domain is more than just picking a nice Mobile Number or Car License Plate, because it affect how people remembers, how people would type it, how Search Engine would pick it up, it also gives an impression to other people and most importantly it is your brand.

Guidlines for Choosing a Domain
Try to get domain that is related to your search keyword. Most of the time, someone already got the dotCom. But you can always add like mydomain.com, thedomain.com, domainworld.com and much more.

Another trick is that you can opt for dash (-) in domain, but it may not be great because people does not like dash as much as Search Engines. So if you get car-classifieds.com, you can get better SEO score, but you might loose some people to carclassifieds.com.

There are also method where you could make out a new name, like most big companies would do, but it would require marketing cost to do branding. Of course if it sticks near to the keyword, it would gives you a double effect.

Long or Short? I would try to have it max at two words, but if characters is short, I will look at three words domain as well. I don’t mind the character as long as people can remembers easily. But it is not advisable to go as long as 64 characthers (which is the longest you can go). I would not even try 20 characters.

Buy from someone else? If you have the budget, you can opt for this, but domain squatters usually wants to make big amount of money, so you will most probably need to have some USD in hand.

.Com or .Net? I will only go for .Com now, unless there is a superb domain out there that I would spend money to keep. Yes, we have some successful .net and even .org. But you should know that you are promoting someone else domain each time you promote yours. And the .com owner will sell you at a high price once you have got your name establish, and it doesn’t matter if the name is a crap name or somewords you made up.

Domain Research
I like AjaxWhois, not sure why, but might be the green colours and it is instant but it only gives you .com and .net results.

Google Keyword Tool has always been a big help in researching for keywords.

Some thesaurus will open up your choice of words

I think this process applies to Blogspot.com, Wordpress.com and even profile name like Twitter (which I have successfully sold one previously). What is your process or choosing a domain?

It seems that more and more people are starting their own eCommerce store in Malaysia. One of the reason is due to Facebook as we can see more and more advertisements on Facebook because it could reach a huge amount of audiance simply at no cost (but time to get friends or fans). Social Network Marketing could be done is so many method using Facebook alone, via Status Update, Fan Page, Groups, Pictures and even creating a whole new user simply for Advertisements. I think Fan Page would be sufficient for most because you could allow more than one admin whereby it will be great for companies with a lot of people in the marketing team.

Another reason because of Classifieds and Forum trade like Mudah and Lowyat, trading online becomes more or a norm. This will be good for those who could get their hand on some niche product and open up opportunity for younger entrepreneur since entry cost for online business is very minimal compare to the conventional brick and mortar stores.

What is the cost?
Read the rest of this entry »

Here is a free Google Adword worth RM100. I believe it is only for new users only and it is said that only the first 100 people to sign up will receive this special offer. The weird thing is that I saw this ads being on Adsense. You will need to sign up with a credit card, usually there is some charges to register with Malaysia Credit Card, it is RM20 if I remember it correctly. It is fine as long as you remember to stop your campaign once your fund is depleted.

Free Google Adword

I am actually trying to start some SEO service and reading up on a lot of different stuff to buck up my skills. And I found this great SEO Guide for beginner by Google, so I am sharing this with my readers here. This is the very basic of Search Engine Optimization, this are the stuff I have been learning and implementing for my whole 6 years as a webmaster.

Basically it includes, Title Tags, Meta Description, SEO Friendly Link, Anchor Text,  Related Content, Easy Navigation and much more. This 22 pages of free SEO ebook by Google is packed information for those who like to learn about SEO

This is a free SEO lesson provided by Google itself, so you will be sure that you are not learning anything that would voilates their TOS.

SEO Guide

This trick actually works well with most php scripts. There is lots of benefit to this rather than ftp out the file from your old host then ftp back all the files to new host. The better I would suggest is to zip your folder for the particular domain whereby you can use the following command:-

tar -zcvf zipfilename.tar.gz foldername/

ie. You moving a domain at riceblogger.com/. use command: tar -zcvf riceblogger.tar.gz riceblogger.com/

then move the zip file to your new host via ftp. To extract .tar.gz, you use this command

tar -zxvf riceblogger.tar.gz

I had no other choice to expore these command because I have a classifieds that contain few thousands of picture in a folder, with Filezilla, I could only display 2000, and I kept missing pictures. With zipping, I can download and upload much faster.

There is also ways to extract large MySQL via SSH. I will post them later. Since I start learning more SSH for my 9 to 6 job, I found it so useful, and it also helps in my experience as a webmaster/blogger/internet marketer. Not to forget my previous post Upgrading Wordpress via SSH, it is still useful when we want to install a new blog, or the automatic upgrade is not working.